Thursday, May 21, 2009

Speaking of mayoral control...

Some of the teachers at Roosevelt High, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's alma mater, feel like they just traded one bureaucracy for another when the mayor took control of the schools. The teachers are trying to create smaller learning communities within this giant, 4,700-student high school in East L.A. But it seems that top-down reform has made things worse.

Decision-making by PLAS administrators is irritatingly haphazard and confusing, said English teacher Rebecca Lizardi. Can a student in one of the seven small academies take a class available only in another academy? One day yes, the next day no. "Why don't they just use a Ouija board?" Lizardi cracked. (Steve Lopez, L.A. Times)

1 comment:

I don't think any teacher at Roosevelt disagrees with the IDEAL small school...I should know. I teach there. But what was promised was not even remotely close to what this partnership has delivered. If you look closely, the person who is running PLAS worked in charge of Green Dot schools. Again, the mentality with them is: be selective of the kids and if they screw up, kick them back to the "general population" of their feeder school...by itself, this is criminal, since it skews Green dot's test scores, and crushes our school's scores. This is completely top-down: teachers were lied to (yes, they'll nod and take notes without acting on any suggestions) students are currently being lied to (in the form of being given a "choice" of small schools for next semester, but what students don't realize is that these choices have already been made for them-this is sinister), and parents are not being given a voice (not informed of meetings, and many of the comuunications out to parents are in English-only, and this is a 99% Latino community)

We tried all of the band-aids (SLC's, Site-Based Management, LEARN, etc. etc) that the district forced on us because they were unable to build us more schools. Now that we have new schools, we can't even run them the way we need to (the budget has a lot to do with this, too.) Sad.

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Educator, writer, school/community activist.
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